From
the downtown artists of Manhattan to the thoroughbreds of
Saratoga, Dona Ann McAdams gets close to what she photographs

By
Jacqueline Keren

Photos By Shannon DeCelle

A photographer has only a few seconds to take a picture. How
she prepares for that moment can run the gambit. Dona Ann
McAdams spends years “learning the language” of her subjects
before she captures an image she’s satisfied with. “When I
do anything, I need to immerse myself in it and be responsible,
photographically and humanistically,” she says. “I need to
understand the language [of what I’m shooting].”

McAdams’ subjects range from performance artists in New York
City’s East Village to thoroughbred horses at Saratoga Race
Course; immersion has meant understanding, common language
and friendship. “I don’t want to be dictated to by my lens,”
she says. “I want that rapport.” The result is portraits that
are disquietingly intimate.

Born on Long Island, McAdams spent the ’70s in San Francisco
studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and photographing
the city’s street life. From there, she roamed, absorbed by
the communities she photographed—a changing barrio in Spain,
the mentally ill in New York City, anti-nuclear activists
in Australia. Her work, she says, is about more than the images.
“I have to educate. I’m a political activist. Art can be beautiful,
but I feel it has to do more than that—educate, enlighten,
provide.”

McAdams’ activism has taken many forms. She is one of the
founders of Visual AIDS, a group uniting artists and art institutions
for activism around AIDS, and a member of the Visual AIDS
Artists Caucus, creator of the AIDS ribbon. As a teacher,
she has ventured beyond academia to put together several community
darkrooms and to work on art projects with the mentally ill.

Her work as house photographer for PS 122, a performance space
in the East Village, grew out of her friendships with the
performers. “These were my friends,” she says. “I knew how
they moved.” Her photographs of the intensely personal and
political performances of the ’80s and ’90s appeared in the
book Caught in the Act, published by Aperture in 1996.
Ironically, the same photos were flaunted on the floor of
the U.S. Senate by the late Senator Jesse Helms in a successful
attempt to curtail funding for the beleaguered National Endowment
for the Arts. Helms condemned the work of several artists
with NEA grants, calling it obscene. Among those was Karen
Finley, an East Village performance artist and friend of McAdams
who used her body as a prop in shows that centered on the
degradation of women. As with McAdams, her performances are
deeply personal pieces in which the boundary between audience
and performer breaks down, making for an uneasy experience.

McAdams was, she says, the “triage unit for the ‘obscene ones.’
” Hounded by the press for the most provocative pictures,
she released photos that were less likely to fuel the flames,
incurring the ire of both Helms and the media.

While she misses photographing live performance, McAdams admits
that the East Village and PS 122 changed over the years, the
artistic community decimated by AIDS and the inevitable neighborhood
gentrification. The audiences, she says, changed too. “People
want to be entertained. People don’t want to live with pictures
of mental illness or Katrina. They want to live with things
that are beautiful.”

So McAdams, looking for new ma terial, turned to beauty too,
moving to West Virginia and then Vermont with her husband,
the novelist Brad Kessler, where she found “performance art”
in rural life—the elder farmers of Appalachia, dairy and goat
farmers of New England. As with all her subjects, she wanted
to immerse herself in its life cycle, and she and Kessler
became owners of a small herd of goats.

Knowing me, knowing you: McAdams and one
of her “divas.”

Horses
were the obvious next step. To understand her “new divas,”
she took up riding with Amy LaBarron, barn manager of Chestnut
Ridge Stables in Cambridge, N.Y. It was, she says, the “most
responsible thing for me to do. I couldn’t just go into a
stall and have a rapport [with the horses]. I would need to
know them.” LaBarron, who rescues retired thoroughbreds, became
her muse, introducing her to trainer Glenn DiSanto and the
working thoroughbreds of Saratoga Race Course.

Her first group of photos from Saratoga is exhibited through
September at North Main Gallery in Salem, Washington County.
The best of them, she says, “transfer from documentary to
that other place. Something that’s interesting, lyrical, beautiful.”
Her portrait of the racehorse Northern Boulevard, taken in
his stall, is unsettling in its humanity. “He had to know
me and I had to know him. I had to have that understanding
[of him] to do him justice.”

She plans to continue to tell the story of the backstretch
in a book of her photographs, The Year of the Horse.
In the meantime, she has also found another cause in saving
retired thoroughbreds from being shipped abroad and slaughtered
for food. “I thought I’d take pictures that are lyrical and
free and not engaged in an issue,” she says. “But look what
happened. They [the retired race horses] get shipped to Belgium
or France and eaten. I don’t know what the answers are, but
people need to think about this.” True to her activist roots,
she is committing 15 percent of the sales of her work to LaBarron’s
nonprofit organization, Try Thoroughbreds. “If a horse runs
hard and tries hard and isn’t fast enough, [it] needs a place
to go and so do the homeless and mentally ill. You pick your
battles, and this is mine right now.”

In the winter months when the track is closed, McAdams turns
her lens back on the farms of Vermont and New York. But immersing
herself in the backstretch is the main focus for the foreseeable
future. “This is it. This is my portfolio. How much time do
I have left? It will take me a really long time to do justice
to it.”

The Meet, photographs by Dona Ann McAdams, will be on view
at the North Main Gallery (196 N. Main St., Salem) through
Sept. 4. For more info, call the gallery at 854-3406.